"Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the traditional business paradigm the objective was about growth. 'Empire' equaled expansion and was about size: more and bigger. In today’s market (business 2.0) scale is less about dimensions and more about complexity.

Over the years conventional thinking said cultivate your resources so that you can grow your business/organization/enterprise (expand the client base, increase employee numbers, make more profit...repeat). Yet with the proliferation of the ‘social universe’, a different kind of narrative is emerging.

Newspaper organizations aren’t simply grappling with how to get more subscribers. They’re trying to figure out how to compete with the digitization of information. Music labels have slowly been picked apart by the mp3 file, and are now in a yelling match with Youtube, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud (for starters) for the attention of music fans. And we won’t even get into how Amazon and Netflix have changed the game of commerce entirely…

Digital isn’t 'physical'. You can't touch or hold it. Yes it can serve as a conduit to/for physical things, but there’s ongoing conversations around the value of 'intangibles' that digital provides. Things such as experience, content, influence, meaning, community, and design are being organized, packaged and sold as value. In a post-industrial economy these ideas are being recontextualized and are creating an entirely new kind of language.

In 2013 (roughly 15+ years into the digital world order) the market is giving birth to a trajectory where the emerging model is a hybrid of the online/offline world. Value isn’t being driven by the traditional measurements of quantity only. New metrics are needed (and are being established) for a landscape where consumers are also producers, where conversations are now products and democratization pertains to data, media, and manufacturing just as much as it does to nation building.

Your intelligent quotient for solving for X (where X = creativity + solving for complexity) will be what allows you to flourish in a world in which the only constant seems to be…perpetual flux.